Why turn to a biocentric vision of nature?

By Nathan Batalion, PhD, Naturopath, Triathlete

(Healingtalks) The cosmology of many American Indians was biocentric. It was filled with images of alive plants and animals and as representing a living essence of nature. In our modern times, we have moved, instead, towards a relatively dead, machine-like, mechanical vision of nature. This modern vision shift impacts nearly every aspect of our lives…. especially our foods.

Living foods with enzymes

I have the great respect for Ann Wigmore, one of the founders of the raw food movement. One of the things she advocated was that we should eat living foods primarily for their life-enhancing enzymes. These enzymes aide digestion. They also speed up countless chemical reactions in the body. If you heat a food over 11o degrees or more, the enzymes tend to die.

Because of life in our foods

There is life in our foods symbolized by enzymes but also permeating throughout, as long as raw foods are not heated to high temperatures. If you roast an almond and plant it in the ground, for example, it will not grow an almond tree.

Not Reducible to Math/Mechanical Explanations

It has been my philosophy of life that life itself is at the core of nature, making up the interior essence of the world we live in – an essence brought out by living things. The conventional philosophy of nature’s essence is that it is mathematical, an essence brought out or displayed by the invention of machine. But to me math symbols are not infallible tools to discover nature’s essence. To me this is the most powerful of misguiding visions. Why? Because they simply put, symbols are pointing tools and math symbols point to universal relationships of separation in our consciousness. We cannot best connect a vision when point to patterns of separation in nature. The number one is the universal separate whole. Count three apples and then make apple sauce with them. Afterwards you can no longer count them because they are not any longer separate.

Living Almond Tree

Math-designed things, like machines, tend to be dead

This because at the core of life is consciousness. What is that consciousness? For me it is a universal relationship of connection. I am conscious of something means I connect with it. But math symbols point oppositely! They thus would have the bias of pointing us away from what is life! Chemical analysis (reducing nature to mathematics) will tell us there is no difference between a dead roasted almond… and a living non-roasted almond. They just have the same potassium, calcium, magnesium and so on – and we are supposed to believe that that is all there is to nature.

A Life-Centered Understanding

There is a different way of looking at things, including the food we eat. When we cut any whole food apart , some aliveness is thus lost. This is again because life is the concentrated presence of a conscious, thus whole organism, plant or animal. Ultimately it is HUGE intellectual mistake to reduce life thus to mechanical (separate machine part-like or math-like) principles – the very principles whose universalization now threaten life on our planet. It is not accidental that Alzheimer’s patients routinely walk the halls of nursing homes like zombies after being given multiple synthetic chemical drugs that are math-designed.

Oh but some say a new chemical cure is just around the corner to heal Alzheimer’s disease! Thus we fool ourselves into believing, following the modern ideology of nature. Actually we need a more enlightened understanding to uplift those who have fallen, including the Nobel Prize winning physicists and chemists who have died with Alzheimer’s disease. That fact, in itself, is very telling.